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Abstract

This article surveys the impacts of blogging on Canadian historical practice to date. Drawing upon the experiences and practices of five collaborative or multi-author Canadian history blogs — ActiveHistory.ca, The Otter~La Loutre, Findings/Trouvailles, the Acadiensis Blog, and Borealia — it explores how this activity is changing the ways in which Canadian historians tell stories, publish their research, teach, and serve academic and wider communities. Blogging has encouraged new forms of historical storytelling and the inclusion of underrepresented and marginalized voices in public discussions of Canadian historical narratives. It is being integrated into cycles of academic publication and undergraduate and graduate classrooms. Yet challenges remain with regard to determining the place and value of blogging within standard paradigms of academic labour. As more Canadian historians come to read, write for, and edit historical blogs, however, they will not only help shift the practice of Canadian history inside and outside university campuses, but will also experience the pleasures and rewards of this kind of digital historical work for themselves.

Article body

Since the turn of the century, history blogging (or weblogging) has grown in volume
and popularity. Emerging and established Canadian historians are increasingly publishing
work in collaborative and multi-author blogs.[1] Like
peer-reviewed journals, these blogs often focus upon specific geographical, thematic,
temporal, or methodological areas of research.[2] Yet
despite the proliferation of Canadian history blogging in recent years, there has been
little collective discussion about how this activity is reshaping the ways in which we
research, write, publish, and teach Canadian history.[3] As
with other digital historical tools and platforms, blogs are producing innovative forms of
scholarly writing and publication and modes of public engagement.[4] As we embark upon this digital turn, we should also assess how blogging, along
with other social media technologies, is transforming the historian’s craft.[5]

This article surveys the impacts of blogging on Canadian historical practice to
date. It focuses upon the five collaborative or multi-author Canadian history blogs with
which the authors have editorial affiliations: ActiveHistory.ca (Beth Robertson), The Otter~La
Loutre (Tina Adcock), Findings/Trouvailles (Stacy Nation-Knapper, Tina Adcock), the Acadiensis blog (Corey Slumkoski), and Borealia (Keith Grant). It discusses this activity’s
relationship to four pillars of the historical profession — storytelling, publication,
teaching, and service — and suggests some of the possibilities and pitfalls that have
emerged so far from each of these intersections. We argue that blogging has encouraged new
forms of historical storytelling and the inclusion of underrepresented and marginalized
voices and perspectives in public discussions of Canadian historical narratives. It is
being integrated into cycles of academic publication and undergraduate and graduate
classrooms. Yet challenges remain with regard to determining the place and value of
blogging within standard paradigms of academic labour.

We are heartened to note blogging’s growing traction in the Canadian historical
discipline, as symbolized most recently by ActiveHistory.ca’s receipt of the Canadian Historical Association’s Public
History Prize in 2016. Indeed, our decision to publish this article in the CHA’s scholarly
organ, instead of on our blogs, is a conscious act of outreach to colleagues who may not
have had the opportunity to delve very deeply into the Canadian history blogosphere.
Historians sometimes turn to interviews, op-eds, and other forms of popular media to
disseminate their research beyond the academy. Here, we travel in something like the
opposite direction. We provide a snapshot of the present state of Canadian history
blogging in a traditional print journal — albeit in an issue published electronically — in
order to bring these activities more fully into conversation with other contemporary
developments in the Canadian historical profession. We invite readers to follow the
hyperlinks in our notes and to join the rich scholarly communities that have congregated
around these digital seminar tables, or within these digital common rooms. As more
Canadian historians come to read, write for, and edit history blogs, they will not only
help shift the practice of Canadian history inside and outside university campuses, but
will also experience the pleasures and rewards of this kind of digital historical work for
themselves.

About the Blogs

Each of the five blogs represented here takes a unique approach to, or has a
distinct purpose in disseminating Canadian history. One of the earliest multi-author blogs
in this field, ActiveHistory.ca, has provided a
model for subsequent efforts. The founders of ActiveHistory.ca were inspired by influential single-author blogs such as the
one written by Christopher Moore, as well as international websites such as History & Policy.[6]
Determined to engage a wider public, they established the blog in 2008, following the
conference “Active History: History for the Future” held at Glendon College in September
of that year. Although some of the initial people are still involved, the editorial
collective, collaborators, and contributors have evolved over time. The co-editors
understand “active history” in various ways, as “history that listens and is responsive;
history that will make a tangible difference in people’s lives; history that makes an
intervention and is transformative to both practitioners and communities.”[7]ActiveHistory.ca
develops this notion of active history through blogging. Whether providing informed
commentary on current events from a historical perspective, illuminating community-based
research practices, or reflecting on public engagement, the website provides a platform
for academics, public historians, archivists, museum professionals, and civil servants to
engage in the potential of historical thinking.[8]

The Otter~La Loutre, originally named
Nature’s Chroniclers, is the blog of the Network
in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE). It began as a communication hub for
participants in NiCHE’s 7-year Strategic Clusters grant (2007–2014) from SSHRC. From the
website’s inception in 2007, Alan MacEachern, Adam Crymble, and Jim Clifford invited
Canadian environmental historians to submit posts suitable for academic and non-academic
audiences. At first, some of the material published online was reprinted in a separate
digital newsletter that was sent to interested parties several times each year.[9] Joshua MacFadyen oversaw The
Otter~La Loutre’s transition to a fully Web-based environment, and expanded its
remit to include features such as a regular book review section and additional
French-language content. Since 2014, NiCHE’s website and blog have been run by an
editorial collective of eight scholars, four of whom work closely with The Otter~La Loutre. Although the blog chiefly represents
and serves the Canadian environmental historical community, it also reaches out to
Canadian historians whose research and teaching concern broader relationships between
Canadians and their environments in the past. Its readership extends past national
borders, too. NiCHE’s blog, website, and Facebook and Twitter feeds together comprise an
important hub for environmental historians in North America, since there is no equivalent
digital presence among American environmental historians. Digital environmental historians
from around the world also follow NiCHE’s social media accounts and read The Otter~La Loutre.

Douglas Hunter and Patrice Dutil founded Findings/Trouvailles in the fall of 2013 to further The Champlain Society’s
mission of increasing “public awareness of, and accessibility to, Canada’s rich store of
historical records.”[10] The blog continues the Society’s
tradition of publishing historical “finds,” but does so in a digital format that
complements the Society’s characteristic red-bound editions. Monthly posts focus on a
specific textual, audiovisual, or material primary source, illuminating the content and
context of this “find” and explaining how it enhances present understandings of Canadian
history. The original Findings/Trouvailles
editorial committee included Hunter, Dutil, Stacy Nation-Knapper, and Tina Adcock; it has
since expanded to include eight editors. Early contributors to Findings/Trouvailles included members of the editorial
committee and of the Society. The roll-call of authors is now more diverse, and the
editors especially encourage early-career scholars to publish research finds in an
accessible format that openly promotes enthusiasm for historical research.

The Acadiensis blog was launched in 2015 to
place the journal Acadiensis at the forefront of
digitally-engaged scholarly periodicals. Although digitized back issues of Acadiensis had long been available on the journal’s
website, the website was redesigned and expanded in 2014. Journal co-editors John Reid and
Sasha Mullally turned increasingly toward social media as a form of publication, outreach,
and promotion. They set up the Acadiensis blog, a
Facebook page, and Twitter feed for the journal, and recruited Corey Slumkoski to oversee
these elements as the journal’s first Digital Communications Editor. At the time this
paper was submitted for publication, the blog had published approximately 90 posts on a
weekly schedule. New content is generally published every Monday, and most Thursdays
feature a “throwback” piece wherein a link is posted to an article from Acadiensis’ archives relevant to current events. For
example, during the Fort McMurray fire of May 2016, as many displaced Maritimers returned
home, the blog featured Patricia Thornton’s important 1985 article about outmigration from
the Maritimes.[11]

Borealia is a collaborative blog on early
Canadian history, broadly construed. It is a forum for historians of northern North
America until approximately the end of the nineteenth century, encompassing Indigenous,
French, British, and early Canadian national history. When Denis McKim and Keith Grant
launched the blog in 2015, these related subfields were often diffused among several
specialized conferences and journals. They wanted to create an online space to bring those
various subfields together under an “early Canadian” banner for collaboration and
cross-fertilization, and to introduce this work to an interested general readership.
Borealia invites contributions from professional
historians working in academic, public, and alt-academic settings and advanced graduate
students. To date, over 40 historians, representing many career stages, have written for
the blog. Borealia has also developed into a
forum for transnational conversations, especially between early Canadianists and early
Americanists. What began as an accident of the editors’ personal networks and research
interests has become an intentional editorial stance of seeking to put early “Canada” in
continental, Atlantic, and global contexts. With half of the blog’s readers and a third of
its contributors located in the United States, Borealia’s editors now encourage essays that straddle the border and check
nationalistic assumptions in the historiography of early North America.

Blogging and Storytelling

Canadian digital historians have used the nimbleness, flexibility, and accessibility
of blogging platforms to experiment with narrative form and tell complex, yet engaging
stories en plein air to more-than-academic
audiences.[12] Blogging has also created space for voices
traditionally underrepresented in, or excluded from Canadian history narratives and their
contemporary narration. It is already transforming and democratizing the field, although
it retains the potential to reproduce existing structural inequities in the Canadian
academy.

Bloggers often tell stories about Canada’s past that are smaller in scope, though
not necessarily less significant than those found in conventional venues of publication.
Most posts on collaborative or multi-author blogs are 750–1,500 words long. The blog
post’s brevity makes it an ideal form in which to engage with a single item or argument in
depth: to explore a fascinating source culled from a journal article or book chapter, to
linger over a methodological or historiographical problem, or to develop a stray thematic
thread from a larger research project. Within the Canadian history blogosphere, Findings/Trouvailles provides a unique venue for this kind
of micronarrative. Each post discusses and analyzes a source, but dispenses with the
larger analytical apparatus that surrounds such sources in long-form historical
narratives. By highlighting the thrill of the “find,” Finding/Trouvailles posts also reveal the affective dimension of historical
research, or the excitement of unearthing jewels in the archives. Such experiences are
rarely discussed in academic publications, but can help attract non-academic readers to
history blogs even as they educate them about this often-obscured facet of professional
historical work.

While blog posts are nimble in scope, blogging platforms are equally nimble in their
flexibility and celerity of publication. Unlike the print medium, blogs can integrate
non-textual and digitized sources easily. An image or video clip can become the
centrepiece of a post, or can be used to supplement arguments advanced concurrently in
traditional print venues.[13]ActiveHistory.ca has also experimented with “exhibits” that link blogging to
less text-based conceptions of storytelling.[14]
Furthermore, collaborative and multi-author Canadian history blogs favour a condensed
process of peer review. Posts undergo at least one round of editorial intervention and
subsequent revision prior to publication, but are usually not sent out for external peer
review. Blogs can therefore publish topical content quickly, enabling historians to
provide expert, near real-time commentary on current events. Within several days of the
2015 federal election, the Acadiensis blog
featured a Maritime-centred analysis of the results, written by a well-known political
scientist. Publishing a similar piece in a peer-reviewed journal such as Acadiensis would have taken much longer — perhaps over a
year — and would have resulted in a piece far less timely. Even a non-refereed research
note in the print journal would have taken some time to see the light of day, owing to
Acadiensis’ set biannual publication
schedule.

For these and other reasons, blogs are an ideal vehicle for communicating Canadian
historical research to academics who do not specialize in this field, as well as students
and members of the public. Most Canadian history blogs are intentionally oriented toward a
hybrid audience of academic and non-academic readers. They enable historians to conduct
conversations in public that are meant to be overheard. They are written in a more
academic manner than popular history magazines, though like them, they strive for readable
narrative and engaging style. As the editors at Borealia like to tell their contributors, if the blog were a restaurant, it
would be casual fine dining: professional, energetic, and accessible.

While all of the blogs discussed here fit this characterization, they employ
different strategies to create such an ambience. Findings/Trouvailles’ editorial committee calls for submissions that are
“informed, but not necessarily scholarly.”[15] This
encourages authors to write in a less formal, and often less formulaic manner that conveys
what the editors hope will be a contagious enthusiasm for historical research. It also
makes the products of that research more digestible to readers unfamiliar with the
conventions of academic history-writing. While Findings/Trouvailles privileges enthusiastic storytelling, ActiveHistory.ca challenges contributors to communicate
complex historical ideas to a broader public. The editors maintain a deep commitment to
theory and critical analysis, while eschewing jargon that might alienate those working
beyond specific scholarly fields or academic institutions. ActiveHistory.ca’s posts speak to, but do not underestimate their readership.
The blog’s editors have also reached out to members of underrepresented and marginalized
groups in the Canadian historical profession and Canadian society, offering them the space
and freedom to tell stories that often stray from and usefully challenge the kinds of
Canadian historical narratives dominant in the public sphere. Indeed, the Canadian history
blogs discussed herein are now striving to tell more inclusive histories, with respect to
language, race, gender, and stage of career.

Although the Canadian history blogosphere, like the profession writ large, is
largely English- speaking, some blogs have actively recruited francophone writers, sought
out editors fluent in French, and published French-language content. Undoubtedly the most
successful has been HistoireEngagée.ca ,
ActiveHistory.ca’s French-language sister site.
Like ActiveHistory.ca,
HistoireEngagée.caendeavours to publish accessible, jargon-free posts that
place contemporary issues and debates in Canada and Québec and on the world stage into
dialogue with historical knowledge.[16] Although the two
blogs operate independently, they maintain a close relationship. They periodically
translate and share content, and their editors are striving to make this happen more
regularly.[17]Findings/Trouvailles and Borealia
have each published a handful of French-language pieces, and have
simultaneously produced English translations to increase such posts’ uptake. The Otter~La Loutre’s experience demonstrates that
sustaining bilingual publishing practices can be difficult over time, however. NiCHE once
had a French-Canada coordinator who ensured the regular publication of French-language
content on The Otter~La Loutre and on the
now-defunct French-language blog Qu’est-ce qui se
passe. They also sourced French-language content from elsewhere, and wrote
English- and French-language posts about ongoing environmental historical research in
Québec and French Canada. Unfortunately, The Otter~La
Loutre’s last French-language editor stepped down in 2014, and the number of
posts written in French has diminished accordingly.

In recent years, Indigenous scholars such as Chelsea Vowel, Erica Violet Lee, and
Zoe Todd have maintained influential personal blogs where they regularly debunk
longstanding myths about Indigenous peoples and cultures and counter neocolonial
renditions of Canadian history.[18] Such conversations also
happen on collaborative and multi-author blogs, where they often challenge editors’ and
readers’ ideas about how Canadian history should be told, who should do the telling, and
what forms that telling should take. One concrete outcome of such discussions was
ActiveHistory.ca’s theme week dedicated to
Indigenous history, which Gwich’in scholar Crystal Fraser guest-edited in January
2016.[19] This theme week has become one of the blog’s most
widely-read examples of this genre. Contributing authors did much more than insert
Indigenous stories into existing Canadian historical narratives. As Adam Gaudry noted, a
simple “add and stir” approach is neither sufficient nor unproblematic.[20] Contributors played with and contested Eurocentric notions of
history’s disciplinary boundaries, its accredited authors, and appropriate methods of
conveying its knowledge. Their perspectives on colonialism, dispossession, clean water on
reserves, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and other pressing topics demonstrate
the potential of often-marginalized voices to intervene in and shift public and academic
conversations about representations of the past.

ActiveHistory.ca has become increasingly
invested in communicating the histories of those underrepresented in such dialogues,
including refugees, African Canadians, people with disabilities, and sexual and gender
minorities. In so doing, its editors consciously join others who present blogging as a
viable means of drawing together academic, community, and embodied identities to make
space for marginalized peoples within online public spheres.[21] Yet ActiveHistory.ca’s editors
remain all too aware of the inherent challenges of representing diverse voices and
perspectives. They strive, if at times imperfectly, to seek out a range of scholarship, to
make space for alternative and divergent ways of knowing and writing about the past, and
to welcome and respond to productive critiques of their efforts in this vein.

Arguably, this set of best inclusive practices is especially necessary in subfields
such as environmental history that remain older, whiter, and more masculine than is
perhaps now the norm in the Canadian historical profession. To give just one example,
The Otter~La Loutre and Borealia’s joint series on early Canadian environmental
history included an introductory post with suggested readings on this topic.[22] The paucity of women authors on that reading list led to some
productive and generous dialogue, both in the comments beneath the post and on Twitter,
about gender and authorship in the subfields of early Canadian history and Canadian
environmental history.[23] Like the editors of ActiveHistory.ca, those of Borealia and The Otter~La Loutre
actively encourage multiple voices and approaches, but sometimes fall short of the mark,
owing to structural reasons, personal myopia, or contingent circumstances. Happily,
mistakes can engender useful conversations and renew editors’ aspirational commitment to
equitable representation on their blogs.

Finally, the place of non-tenure-track, alt-academic, and post-academic scholars in
Canadian history blogging merits consideration. Blogging is one means by which these often
exemplary writers and researchers can continue to intervene in scholarly debates and
thereby participate in scholarly communities, to everyone’s benefit. However, blogging is
usually unpaid labour; as with many aspects of the academic economy, bloggers are paid in
kind rather than coin. Editors should think especially carefully before asking
non-tenure-track scholars, or those transitioning out of the academy, to work on the same
terms as tenure-track or tenured scholars. As Melissa Gregg has argued, blogging may
provide a means for emerging authors to contribute to what seems to be a radical
democratization of knowledge in the Web 2.0 world. But they often only do so when
precariously paid — if at all — and thoroughly overworked.[24] Some simply cannot afford to do so. When the editors of Findings/Trouvailles recently approached a post-academic
scholar about writing a post, they replied, quite reasonably, that they no longer wrote
for venues that did not pay them. As in the case of other underrepresented or marginalized
scholars, we should make our blogs welcoming places for such contributors, and should not
hesitate to approach them. But we must remain mindful of such issues when we do so. While
Canadian history blogging has produced more flexible, responsive, and inclusive modes of
storytelling in front of larger and more heterogeneous audiences, it is imbricated with
existing academic structures of power and privilege and may work to entrench, rather than
subvert present inequities, despite blog editors’ best intentions.

Blogging and Publishing

No simple answer exists to the question of how academic history blogging relates to
traditional print publishing. Blogs can complement scholarly publishing in several ways,
but the medium is also pushing scholarly publication toward a more open-access model.
Academic blogging can be situated at several points on what book historian Robert Darnton
terms the “communications circuit.”[25] Darnton’s diagram
maps the relationship between authors, publishers, consumers, and readers, highlighting
the social production of knowledge. Historians currently use blogging to gain feedback in
the early stages of writing and framing a project, to draw attention to book or journal
publications, and to connect with readers throughout the research cycle. We agree with
Julia Martin and Brian Hughes’ definition of blogging as a form of publication that grants
“scholars and researchers a more accessible avenue of discourse than peer-reviewed
journals.”[26]

Blogging can help writers in the pre-publication stages of historical communication.
Writing to engage a broad public readership can help scholars become better writers and
more effective communicators.[27] The format also provides
historians with an opportunity to try out ideas, write a preliminary analysis of a
research find, solicit sources, or initiate an informed conversation with readers on the
direction of a project, using the comments sections of blogs or linked social media
accounts. We also know of contributors who have been approached by university presses
about book contracts on the basis of well-written blog posts outlining their research
project.

In the new hybrid ecology of scholarly publication, blogging, along with other forms
of social media, plays a vital role in the circulation of traditional print
publications.[28] Canadian history blogs have developed
various strategies to draw attention to new conventionally-published scholarship. At
Borealia, Keith Grant curates a twice-yearly
preview of new books in early Canadian history. Similarly, at The Otter~La Loutre, Alan MacEachern posts an annual
“Booklook” featuring new monographs in environmental history, and other editors have
written similar collaborative posts about new journal articles.[29] Every month, The Otter~La Loutre’s
social media editor Jessica DeWitt selects the five best scholarly or popular articles
about environmental history published online in the past month, and prepares a combined
blog post and video interview with Otter
editor-in-chief Sean Kheraj called “#EnvHist Worth Reading.”[30] Inspired by and often in collaboration with The
Otter~La Loutre, ActiveHistory.ca has
published pieces that highlight ten publications meant to help contextualize a pressing
contemporary issue. Some of these posts have focused on the Idle No More Movement, debates
over vaccinations, or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s impact on the practice of
history.[31]

Several Canadian history blogs also publish author interviews, book reviews, and
essays on recent historiography, taking advantage of their accelerated editorial process
to engage with new monographs and emerging trends in research months (or even years)
before major print journals. Acadiensis, for
example, uses its blog to publish reviews of single books, while the print journal remains
committed to longer review essays that assess multiple works. Some reviews therefore
appear on the blog long before they would be seen in print. That journals such as
Acadiensis treat their blog as an extension of
the print publication suggests that the role of blogs and social media in the circulation
of scholarship should be taken into account alongside traditional citations when measuring
scholarly impact.[32]

Blogs associated with print publications not only aid the latter’s circulation, but
can also provide an additional layer of online content, as mentioned above.[33] As an initiative of The Champlain Society, an organization
dedicated to publishing scholarly works and editions, Findings/Trouvailles occasionally features posts directly related to larger
book projects. Sandra Alston’s piece on a mid-nineteenth-century “Canadian ball” at
Rivière-du-Loup provided a taste of the material in William Ord Mackenzie’s journal, a
scholarly edition of which appeared under the Champlain Society’s imprint later that
year.[34] The Acadiensis blog encourages scholars to contribute a blog post as a “movie
trailer” for their research — a short, pithy piece that captures some of what their study
has done, and which links to the longer-form article published in Acadiensis. Writing for an academic blog, then, can
complement several stages of scholarly communication, from effective writing and
intellectual exchanges about research to circulating print publications and enhancing them
with digital content. Yet blogs can also push beyond the boundaries of traditional
publications.

Blogging is one of the purest forms of open-access publishing, fuelled by an almost
unmitigated desire to “engag[e] with a wider community.”[35]
There are no blackouts, paywalls, or embargos limiting access to blog posts. Recently,
SSHRC has encouraged Canadian scholarly journals to make their content more accessible to
members of the public, who support research through their tax dollars. This process has
often been fraught with difficulties as journals strive to protect the subscription bases
upon which their economic viability rests. Free from such financial considerations,
Canadian history blogs make their content available as a matter of choice. Many blogs use
some variety of Creative Commons licensing to specify how their content can be further
distributed. ActiveHistory.ca, in particular, has
strongly advocated for the free and unfettered provision of rigorous historical
scholarship to the general public.[36]

Some of Findings/Trouvailles’ posts have
responded directly to specific requests from different groups to make primary sources
openly accessible. Stacy Nation-Knapper wrote a post to honour an Indigenous community’s
request to make a source available to community members online while further research is
conducted into the material’s broader significance.[37]
Similarly, Donald McLeod published a post during Toronto’s LGBTQ Pride celebration to
fulfill community members’ queries about a source related to this event and its
history.[38] In these ways and others, Canadian history
blogging has been a form of community-driven and -supported publication that enhances
public access to archival sources and their interpretation by professional
historians.[39] As Rohan Maitzen writes, “Blogging — free,
accessible, interactive — restores immediacy to scholarly discussion, removes logistical
roadblocks to knowledge dissemination, and up-ends the communication/validation hierarchy
in favour of the open exchange of ideas. Is that not what academic publishing is actually
supposed to accomplish?”[40]

In some cases, the line between blogs and traditional publications is blurring,
creating new blended or hybrid genres with the potential to reverse or reconfigure usual
trajectories of scholarly publication. The Otter~La
Loutre has now published close to ten special series of posts on subjects as
varied as hydroelectric dams, human-animal relationships, and winter in Canadian
history.[41] Some series feature new and emerging research
at the intersection of environmental history and another thematic field, including the
history of science and technology, labour and working-class history, and the history of
gender and sexuality.[42] OSver time, Otter editors plan to convert some of these series into
free e-books to broaden the reach and maintain the accessibility of these posts, which
will otherwise become increasingly difficult to locate on the blog as new content is
heaped atop old. Likewise, Borealia has discussed
with a university press the possibility of publishing thematic volumes in both e-book and
print formats, similar to those produced in the University of Calgary Press’ Canadian
History and Environment series.

We believe that enhancing access to historical research, whether published online or
offline, can only benefit the profession. Yet we recognize that peer review remains an
essential, if sometimes contested, aspect not only of scholarly publication, but also of
the processes of hiring, tenure, and promotion, as we explore below. Canadian history
blogs have only begun to experiment with peer review. Originally, ActiveHistory.ca’s “Papers” section invited longer-form
(3,000–4,000 words) research or evidence-based opinion essays, attempting to distinguish
these more rigorous “papers” from typical posts. The peer-review process solicited
feedback about an essay’s strengths and weaknesses and suggestions for its improvement,
but also prioritized accessible writing and a streamlined publishing schedule. Most
peer-reviewed essays appeared online within four to six weeks of submission. Over time,
however, the line between blog posts and papers began to blur, making this process
increasingly unclear and unfair to some authors. For example, editors occasionally ran
timely long-form blog posts without peer review, while continuing to require that opinion
essays undergo peer review. In the recent revamping of
ActiveHistory.ca, the Papers section has come to emphasize “features”; it now
houses a broader cross-section of resources available on the site. These include blog
series, classroom resources, and book reviews, in addition to long-form essays that are no
longer peer-reviewed. The decision to reorganize
ActiveHistory.ca in this way was ultimately intended to clarify the kind of
ambiguities detailed above, which, in turn, arise out of blogging’s evolving position
within cycles of academic writing and publishing.

The group or multi-author blogs characteristic of contemporary Canadian history
blogging fall somewhere between individually-authored blogs and conventional publication
venues. They are one form of the “middle ground” that Julia Martin and Brian Hughes call
“Small p Publishing,” defined as “a space between
peer-reviewed discourse and classroom discussion or less-formal academic writing.” Martin
and Hughes argue that by “taking the ease of the blogging environment and adding some of
the certification provided by traditional publishing, … this form of expression can become
more professionally useful and incorporate more members of the academic and professional
community.”[43] Whether Canada’s collaborative and
multi-author history blogs remain a mediating presence in the publishing “middle ground”
or move increasingly toward the peer-reviewed end of the spectrum is yet to be seen. Their
present relationship to modes of traditional publishing tilts that activity in the
direction of broader access, widening the circulation of Canadian historical
scholarship.

Blogging and Teaching

Although twenty-first-century students’ “digital nativity” has been rightly
critiqued in recent years, when confronted with a topic new to them, most students do
naturally turn to Google.[44] Students are intimately
familiar with digital genres of writing such as Wikipedia entries, blog posts, and
articles on popular journalistic websites and news aggregators. They may not, however, be
critical readers of such content, and they may not have had much practice writing in these
genres themselves. Engaging with blogs as readers and writers hones and extends digital
literacy skills introduced at earlier stages of students’ education. It also enables
instructors to achieve learning objectives or educational goals common to post-secondary
history courses, including those related to participatory learning, critical reading and
writing, and the cultivation of civic-mindedness and empathy through exposure to the
past.[45] Recently, editors of Canadian history blogs have
become aware that their materials are increasingly being used in secondary and
post-secondary classrooms, and are beginning to provide pedagogically-useful resources for
instructors based at such institutions.

Instructors should not hesitate to assign blog posts as readings in their courses,
despite their lack of peer review. We believe that the quality of the piece is far more
important than the medium in which it appears. Just because something has appeared on a
blog doesn’t mean it can’t engage and inform students, just as the appearance of a piece
in a peer-reviewed journal does not guarantee its admittance to syllabi. When selecting
blog posts, the instructor may need to assume some of the professional responsibility
normally shouldered by peer reviewers and journal editors. They should consider whether
the piece is appropriate for use in their classroom, and may choose to supplement it with
readings published in more conventional scholarly venues.

By openly discussing these kinds of judgments and other issues surrounding blog
posts in their classrooms, instructors can help students view the information that they
read on their screens in a more critical light. In high school, students tend to encounter
digital literacy predominantly in the context of safety. In post-secondary settings,
instructors can draw on students’ familiarity with blogs to initiate wide-ranging
conversations about material published online and how to discern between reliable and less
reliable resources found there. Students can then build upon their existing digital
literacy skills by engaging in more sophisticated debates about online content, sources,
and the methodologies used to produce these. In many cases, these conversations complement
those that many history instructors conduct regarding the judicious use of primary and
secondary sources in print. They extend students’ budding analytical expertise concerning
source material into the digital realm.[46]

Reading blog posts can also lead students to cultivate traits that are highly valued
in historical and humanistic education, including empathy and civic-mindedness. Posts
published on Canadian history blogs can encourage students to reflect critically upon
their own experiences as Canadians, and to situate those experiences within larger
historical narratives and trajectories. This sharpens their sense of similarity and
difference between the lives of past and present-day Canadians, which, in turn, can
instill empathetic, inclusive notions of “Canadianness” across time and space. In Tina
Adcock’s classroom, Ian Mosby’s posts about analyzing cookbooks as primary documents, and
about his grandmother viewing cooking as drudgery, inspired students to discuss consonant
experiences around food, gender, and labour in their own family histories.[47] Indeed, by featuring a lively writing style and content with
contemporary relevance, blog posts help combat the elephant in all of our classrooms: the
notion that Canadian history is intrinsically boring. Students appreciate it when
instructors make an effort to choose interesting readings. Canadian history blogs offer a
wealth of fascinating, yet academically rigorous perspectives upon our country’s
past.

It is equally, if not even more worthwhile for students to produce as well as
consume digital pieces of writing.[48] Using academic blogs
like those discussed here as their models, assignments that require students to blog aid
their cultivation of traditional history-writing skills. Students practice framing an
argument, citing sources appropriately, and situating their arguments in historiographical
context, much as they would for a research paper. Yet a blog post teaches students more
naturally about style, narrative, and effective public communication than does a
traditional essay, especially if the assignment or course has a public history component.
Equipping students with the facility to write clearly and well often figures prominently
among our course outcomes, but it is a task for which we do not always provide a suitable
medium. Beth Robertson, for instance, found value in simulating the blog-writing
experience by creating reflective online exercises centred around different kinds of media
in which students practiced writing critically-informed pieces for a broader audience. By
adopting a mode of writing familiar to them as readers, but which they did not associate
with academic learning, students seemed better able to wrestle with complex
concepts.

Reading and writing blog posts can also be incorporated into graduate coursework to
good effect. Graduate students preparing for comprehensive exams or striving to master
particular fields ahead of writing theses can benefit from posts that introduce specific
historiographical themes to a general readership, such as those hosted by the early
American history blog The Junto, or that provide
learned discussions of fields.[49] Blog-writing, meanwhile,
may prove an even more beneficial exercise in graduate than undergraduate courses.
Early-career graduate students can all too easily use the linguistic and structural
conventions of academic writing as a convenient crutch upon which to lean. By asking
students to communicate academic findings clearly but rigorously for a mixed audience,
instructors can help them find their own scholarly voice — an important step in their
professional development. Especially when given free rein with respect to topic and
approach, graduate students seem to find the experience of blogging simultaneously
enjoyable and useful.

As the connection between blogging and teaching strengthens, Canadian history blogs
have begun to provide resources for post-secondary instructors. These resources often
complement those available on purpose-built historical education websites, such as that
operated by The History Education Network/Histoire et Éducation en Réseau
(THEN/HiER).[50] A growing number of teaching resources and
education-themed posts have appeared on ActiveHistory.ca in recent years.[51] Both
The Otter~La Loutre specifically and NiCHE’s
website more generally offer resources for instructors of environmental history. In the
mini-series “Portrait of a Country,” Otter editor
Claire Campbell highlights visual resources available online that can be used to teach
important themes in Canadian environmental history — the North, wilderness, and so on. In
February 2016, The Otter~La Loutre published a
two-part post on the “greatest hits” of Canadian environmental history, in which editors
selected scholarly works published before 1990 that they still found useful in the
classroom.[52] NiCHE’s website devotes a page to teaching
materials, including suggested textbooks and sample syllabi for Canadian and North
American environmental history courses.[53] Over at
Borealia, meanwhile, Kathryn Magee Labelle has
provided instructors teaching the pre-Confederation survey with specific biographical
content about often-overlooked Indigenous actors.[54]

Although most of our knowledge about blogging and its integration into Canadian
history classrooms is anecdotal, more and more post-secondary instructors seem to be
including blog posts on their syllabi and experimenting with assignments that incorporate
blogging. Some fruits of Canadian history blogging, particularly those published by
Borealia, are finding their way into high school
classrooms as well. The editors of Borealia hope
to learn more about the pedagogical niche that these posts occupy in such spaces, and to
consider how they can intentionally support such uses in ways that respect and reflect the
nature of the genre and its present place within the scholarly publishing
ecosystem.

Blogging, Scholarship, and Service

Like scholars in other fields, Canadian historians continue to debate the exact
value and place of blogging in academia. Should blogging count as scholarship, or service?
As knowledge creation, or knowledge mobilization? Does blogging ultimately hinder, or help
the prospects of early-career academics applying for postdoctoral fellowships and
tenure-track positions, and their more senior counterparts applying for tenure and
promotion? If blogging can lead to junior scholars’ (further) marginalization within
academe, more established scholars may wish to reconsider the wisdom and ethics of
courting them as authors and editors. We consider blogging to be scholarship as well as
service, but acknowledge that its recognition as scholarship depends largely on the
culture of the department or university with which one is affiliated, or at which one is
seeking to gain employment. Yet more and more scholars are now recognizing established
collaborative and multi-author Canadian history blogs as forums for publication as well as
knowledge dissemination and public engagement. Blog editors can help make Canadian
historians more familiar with and invested in this kind of history-writing. This may, in
turn, help to solidify and naturalize blogging’s place within disciplinary rhythms of work
and its assessment.

Rohan Maitzen has suggested that “academic blogging can and should have an
acknowledged place in the overall ecology of scholarship.”[55] While we concur with Maitzen in principle, we believe that the more salient
question is how to quantify blogging as a form of scholarship, especially given its
neophyte status in the academy. There is no consensus regarding how to record blogging in
curricula vitae, or how much weight to accord blog posts placed under the heading of
publications. The scale of the form makes some scholars pause. Although posts often
originate from larger research projects, the time and effort expended in writing a blog
post is obviously nowhere near that required to produce a peer-reviewed article or book
chapter, let alone a monograph. Moreover, given that blog posts do not undergo formal peer
review, some scholars are understandably chary of recognizing them as fully-fledged works
of scholarship. Blog posts are perhaps akin to book reviews or op-eds: they count for
something, but not for anywhere as much as a more substantive piece of research.

Even as blogging constitutes a form of scholarship, it is also a vector for academic
service and public outreach. Blogs disseminate scholarly research far more widely than
most peer-reviewed journals or academic monographs. Corey Slumkoski, for example, has
enjoyed much greater engagement with the general public through his blog posts and
stewardship of the Acadiensis blog than through
any of his peer-reviewed publications. Blogging may yet become a standard form of service
within the historical discipline. As Nancy Janovicek pointed out during the discussion
that followed the roundtable on which this article is based, many academics work in
publicly-funded institutions or are otherwise supported by public funds. They have a
responsibility to convey their research findings to the public that supports them.
Academic history blogging thus becomes a “means of accountability” to that
audience.[56] It is ironic that this singularly useful means
of promoting our discipline to laypeople, including potential history students in an era
of declining humanities enrollments, is still not consistently regarded as a meaningful
contribution by our academic peers and colleagues.

Given blogging’s tenuous place within academic hierarchies of labour and prestige,
we believe that graduate students aspiring to traditional academic careers should
carefully consider how to balance this kind of writing with the work of publishing
peer-reviewed articles. This point must be made precisely because blogging, as a form of publication, can be really alluring. A blog
post can be written in days rather than weeks or months. It requires fewer and less
fundamental revisions than does a refereed article. The length of time between composition
and publication is comparatively short, and writers receive near-instantaneous feedback in
the form of comments, likes, and tweets. But blog posts are not substitutes for the kind
of scholarly work that hiring committees and tenure and promotion committees expect
early-career researchers to produce, and that takes substantial time and labour to do
well.[57] Blogging may provide junior scholars with valuable
exposure and networking opportunities, but it will not lead to a permanent academic post
in and of itself. Early in one’s academic career, the energy and creativity needed to
write blog posts should not hinder or replace the effort required to produce more
conventional (and conventionally-rewarded) publications.

Nor will editorial work on blogs necessarily help graduate students, precariously
employed scholars, or untenured scholars secure a permanent position or promotion. For
example, Corey Slumkoski accepted the editorship of the Acadiensis blog not only because it would grant him an active role in the
evolving world of digital history, including blogging, but also because it came with an
editorial position with Acadiensis, that of
digital communications editor. He knew that even if his department’s Rank, Tenure, and
Promotion committee declined to consider his digital editorial work a meaningful
contribution to the field, serving on the editorial committee of a prestigious academic
journal would carry weight. Faced with the prospect that peers and colleagues may not
accord much value to blogging, academics who write for and edit blogs may need to present
that work according to conventional understandings of academic labour, since their digital
toil will be assessed within such frameworks. Writing posts for a collaborative or
multi-author blog can be framed as a form of scholarly impact in one’s tenure package, or
as a means of knowledge mobilization in a research grant proposal. Editing a thematic blog
is best packaged as service to the discipline, particularly if that blog is affiliated
with a scholarly society or journal or housed within a university department, centre, or
institute.

Caveats aside, a growing number of early-career Canadian historians have derived
tangible professional benefits from digital historical scholarship and service, whether
through writing for and editing blogs, microblogging on Twitter, or maintaining a visible,
thoughtfully-curated online presence on social media or their own independent professional
websites. We know of one scholar who was invited to co-edit a peer-reviewed collection,
now under contract with the University of British Columbia Press, by a tenured colleague
whom they had met only once in person, but who had been impressed by their tweets. Corey
Slumkoski and Tina Adcock, along with other blog editors now in tenured or tenure-track
positions, confirm that their early-career digital historical activities set them apart
from other job applicants and increased their visibility within academic networks, even if
they did not directly produce job offers.[58]

We suggest that blog editors, most of whom are still in the early stages of their
own careers, afford (other) early-career researchers the same consideration as untenured
or precariously employed scholars. Emerging scholars must engage in an ever-increasing
number of tasks simply to be considered viable candidates in highly competitive job
markets.[59] Blogging may come to be experienced as yet
another requirement imposed upon an overworked and often meagerly compensated segment of
academia.[60] Canadian history blogs should open their doors
to such scholars, but leave it up to individuals to decide whether or not they wish to
cross that threshold. The experience of Findings/Trouvailles, which has specifically sought to feature the research of
emerging Canadian historians, is instructive. Of 50 posts published over three-and-a-half
years, only 18 were written by early-career scholars. Seven were written by early- to
mid-career scholars. Because of the many demands on such scholars’ time, Findings/Trouvailles has had difficulty soliciting posts
from the very demographic its editors set out to work with most closely.

Interested early-career academics should have the opportunity not only to write for
multi-authored blogs, but to serve as editors, too. When Findings/Trouvailles expanded
their editorial committee in January 2016, editors made the conscious decision to bring
two doctoral candidates, Travis Hay and Abril Liberatori, aboard. Daniel Ross, who joined
the editorial collective of ActiveHistory.ca as a
doctoral candidate but who has since defended, has been an invaluable public outreach
coordinator. Not unlike internships with peer-reviewed journals, positions on a blog’s
editorial board give early-career scholars the opportunity to meet junior and senior
scholars hailing from all corners of the country, to encounter scholarly writing of all
styles and at all stages of completion, and to make a good first impression through
careful and generous editorial work and through courteous professional behaviour more
generally.

Given the widespread, if not always accurate perception that blogging is a young
scholar’s game, history blogging may become the front line of a new “history war” waged
between advocates of the digital humanities and scholars of more traditional proclivities.
Even the most technophobic scholars now acknowledge the benefits that digital advances
have conferred upon the historical discipline. It would be difficult to find a historian
today who laments the use of a word processor to write, or who decries the existence of
online journals. Yet these things are digital replications of analog aspects of historical
practice. Scholars wrote articles and read journals prior to computers and the Internet;
these technologies have merely eased and enriched the work of scholars and increased their
productivity. Blogging, however, has no analog comparator. Multi-author blogs did not
exist in a predigital age. Writing for such a blog might well be many scholars’ first
foray into digital history, as it is unlikely that they would commence by crunching big
data or performing text analysis. History blogging, then, may help to win over scholars
who might not consider digital historical or humanities projects as rigorous or valuable
as traditional forms of scholarship and service. Indeed, this process is already underway.
While some mid- or late-career scholars may remain reluctant to count blog posts as
scholarship, they are generally reading at least some of the posts published on Canadian
history blogs.

Blog editors can facilitate such scholars’ acclimatization, and perhaps eventually
conversion to digital history by deliberately reaching out to this one, last
underrepresented group — underrepresented among digital historians, anyway — and inviting
them to write a post. Generational or age-based assumptions about the makeup of the
history blogging community may actually be dissuading some mid- and late-career academics
from participating. We have found that even senior scholars are often genuinely flattered
to be approached, and that many are willing to contribute posts. Afterwards, some have
thanked editors for the opportunity to re-engage with their long-term research projects,
however fleetingly, in the midst of seemingly never-ending teaching and administrative
duties, and for the pleasure that they derived both from writing the post and witnessing
people’s reactions to it. If, by becoming bloggers themselves, some “traditional”
historians might come to take digital historical work more seriously, then more outreach
toward the upper as well as the lower end of the career spectrum should occur.

In time, blogging may become a natural part of historical work, a typical, although
not obligatory step in a piece’s journey from conception to publication. This will depend,
however, on the goodwill of established scholars in their capacity as editors as well as
authors. Currently, a scholar conducts research, writes up the results in a paper,
presents that paper at one or more conferences, revises it based on feedback received
informally from one’s colleagues, and then submits it to a journal, where it is formally
reviewed. Publishing a blog post could easily become part of this process. Blogging would
enable authors to reach a wider and more varied audience more efficiently, solicit a
broader range of comments and suggestions, and thus tune the paper more finely before it
arrives in a journal editor’s inbox.

Threading blogs into the publication process may be further facilitated by the
structural similarities emerging between group and multi-author blogs and scholarly
journals. Rebecca Goetz contends that most such blogs tend “to function more like
journals, publishing book reviews, interviews with new authors, and … generally longer
pieces.”[61] But editors of academic journals will need to
view such blogs as collaborators rather than competitors in the work of publication.
Potential contributors to the Acadiensis blog
have sometimes hesitated to submit posts, fearing that doing so might negatively affect
their chances of publishing similar research in Acadiensis one day. Aware of such concerns, the editorial board of Acadiensis decided that posting a piece on the Acadiensis blog would not disqualify a longer version of
that piece from being accepted for publication in the journal. We hope that the editorial
boards of other academic journals adopt similar policies with regard to blogging more
broadly.

Blogging is both scholarship and service. It often mobilizes research and writing
practices similar, if not identical, to those required to produce traditional modes of
scholarship. But it also encompasses elements of community engagement and scholarly
networking that reflect and help fulfill expectations of academic service. Whether
blogging hinders or helps academic careers in a formal sense depends on the person, the
place, and a host of contingent and shifting factors, although it appears to be gaining
ground and approbation within the Canadian historical discipline. When managed well and
integrated thoughtfully into historians’ regular cycles of labour and expected duties and
responsibilities, blogging can benefit individual historians, the academic community, and
the larger public we should be striving to reach.

Conclusion: Blogging and Community

Blogging has already reshaped the work of researching, teaching, and communicating
Canadian history in manifold ways. It has usefully broadened the discipline’s range of
narrators and narrative forms, and increased the potential reach of the narratives that
result. It has allowed academic research to travel faster and farther than ever before,
both prior to and after its publication in conventional scholarly forums. It provides
students with the opportunity to refine skills associated with digital literacy and the
comprehension and composition of scholarly writing, and instructors with the means to
achieve learning objectives central to teaching history at the post-secondary level.
Finally, it enables both junior and senior scholars to connect with like-minded peers and
members of the public, and often to derive personal and professional benefits from doing
so. While the labour of blogging has the potential to reinscribe persistent imbalances of
power within the academy and Canadian society, it may also offer marginalized individuals
and groups with the means to broadcast their perspectives more widely. If the Canadian
history blogging community commits to operating on a care-full, thoughtful, and
continually self-reflective basis, and is willing to learn from its missteps and mistakes,
we see every reason to be optimistic about its future.

We conclude on a variation of the theme of inclusiveness that runs throughout the
essay by reflecting upon the community-building capacities of Canadian history blogging.
Blogs can help construct academic communities from scratch, as NiCHE’s website and
The Otter~La Loutre has done for the subfield of
Canadian environmental history. They can provide space online to expand existing
communities and heighten the profile of particular subfields, as Borealia is doing for scholars of early Canadian history.
They can continue and broaden conversations begun at academic conferences, as in the case
of ActiveHistory.ca, now among Canada’s foremost
multi-author blogs. They can draw historians specializing in disparate nations or regions
together by inaugurating interdisciplinary conversations around certain themes or sets of
questions, as the Notches blog has done for the
history of sexuality, or the Age of Revolutions
blog has done for the concept of revolutions in history.[62] Finally, blogs can bridge the divide between paper-based and digital
scholarship, helping staid academic journals such as Acadiensis and BC Studies find a
foothold in the Web 2.0 world of scholarly communication.

We are now entering a new phase of community-building in the Canadian history
blogosphere. Collaborative and multi-author Canadian history blogs have traditionally
served as structural and practical models for each other, and have shared some editorial
personnel. But they have otherwise operated largely in isolation, even as they have each
become vibrant gathering places for Canadian historians and fellow travellers. In the last
year, however, we have seen more and more cross-platform collaborations, both within and
beyond Canada. In May 2016, Borealia and
The Otter~La Loutre hosted a joint series on
early Canadian environmental history, capitalizing on the energy and expertise of
contributors and readers from both subfields. In 2016–17, The Otter~La Loutre and the Wisconsin-based “digital magazine” Edge Effects are co-hosting “Seeds,” a series that
showcases the research of emerging Canadian and American environmental historians.[63] Smaller-scale partnerships have occurred between Borealia and both the Acadiensis blog and ActiveHistory.ca
in Canada, and with The Junto and The Republic blogs on early American history in the United
States.[64]

The proliferation of group and multi-author blogs has created greater vibrancy and
momentum in the Canadian digital historical community. It has fostered an atmosphere of
collaboration, not competition; it has produced greater cohesion between the readers and
writers of these blogs, rather than their fragmentation or dispersal. Just as a street
full of used bookshops becomes a destination, so the growth of history blogging in Canada
has raised the medium’s profile. We hope that the ever-growing collegiality and
conviviality of the Canadian history blogosphere will entice more historians to read,
write, and edit blogs themselves, to experience the joys and benefits of blogging
directly, and perhaps to adjust their estimations of this activity accordingly.

Such a development would benefit not only the profession, but Canadian society. In
tandem with broader ideals of “active history” and community-engaged research, history
blogging can help break down the all-too-persistent myth of the disengaged ivory-tower
academic, both in the eyes of scholars themselves and members of the public. Beth
Robertson remembers being told in one of her first graduate seminars that if anyone in the
room thought they could change the world by doing history, they should leave now. Perhaps
no one history blogger or digital historian has the ability to change the world, at least
not radically. But professional historians are still constituent members of Canadian
society, capable of making meaningful contributions to public debates, to policy-making,
and to commonly-held understandings of Canadian culture and nation. Blogging offers a
user-friendly, easily accessible means to do just that. And even if digital historians
wind up leaving Canada much as it was when they began, blogging may still affect the way
they understand, situate, and carry themselves as researchers and scholars in the wider
world.

Appendices

Biographical notes

TINA ADCOCK is an assistant professor of history at Simon Fraser University. She co-edits The Otter~La Loutre, the blog of the Network in Canadian History and Environment, and sits on the editorial committee of Findings/Trouvailles, The Champlain Society’s blog.

KEITH GRANT is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of New Brunswick, and a founding co-editor of Borealia: A Group Blog on Early Canadian History.

STACY NATION-KNAPPER is a postdoctoral fellow at the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University. She is chair of the editorial committee for Findings/Trouvailles, the blog of The Champlain Society.

BETH ROBERTSON is a sessional lecturer with the Department of History at Carleton University, as well as a research associate with Carleton University’s Disability Research Group. She is one of the co-editors of ActiveHistory.ca.

COREY SLUMKOSKI is an associate professor of history at Mount Saint Vincent University, and the Digital Communications Editor for Acadiensis.

Corey Slumkoski discusses some of the blogs and websites featured here in “History
on the Internet 2.0: The Rise of Social Media,” Acadiensis
41, no. 2 (2012): 153–62. Katherine O’Flaherty and Robert Gee discuss Canadian
scholars’ use of the microblogging service Twitter in “‘Inviting Coworkers’: Linking
Scholars of Atlantic Canada on the Twitter Backchannel,” Acadiensis 41, no. 2 (2012): 143–52. On digital Canadian history and digital
humanities in Canada, see, for example, Corey Slumkoski, Margaret Conrad and Lisa
Charlong, “History on the Internet: The Atlantic Canada Portal,” Acadiensis 37, no. 1 (2008): 100–9; John Bonnett and Kevin
Kee, “Transitions: A Prologue and Preview of Digital Humanities Research in Canada,”
Digital Studies/Le champ numérique 1, no. 2
(2009): http://www.digitalstudies.org/ojs/index.php/digital_studies/article/view/167/222;
Sasha Mullally, “Democratizing the Past?: Canada’s History on the World Wide Web,” in
Settling and Unsettling Memories: Essays in Canadian Public
History, ed. Nicole Neatby and Peter Hodgins (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2012), 235–66; Corey Slumkoski, “Regional History in a Digital Age: The Problems
and Prospects of Atlantic Canadian Studies,” Scholarly and
Research Communication 4, no. 3 (2013): 0301117, 10 pp.; Jennifer Bonnell and
Marcel Fortin, eds., Historical GIS Research in Canada
(Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2014).

One occasion on which ActiveHistory.ca fostered
public engagement recently was at its second conference, “New Directions in Active
History: Institutions, Communications and Technologies,” held in 2015. There, federal
servants discussed the importance of historical thinking to government policy, and
curators and archivists considered how the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission are reshaping their practice. Alan Corbiere also spoke about his work as the
Anishinaabemowin Revitalization Program Coordinator at Lakeview School, M’Chigeeng First
Nation. Although the conference happened in real time, the variety of topics, ideas and
voices on display there reflected the kind of vibrant online conversations that ActiveHistory.ca has helped foster since its inception. Videos
of some of the panels (http://activehistory.ca/videos-from-new-directions-in-active-history-2015/)
and blog posts emerging from the conference were posted to the website. The event also led
to other initiatives and collaborations between the blog and groups such as the Graphic
History Collective (GHC) that have endeavoured to insert alternative and lesser-known
narratives into the public conversation surrounding the 150th anniversary of
Confederation. See especially ActiveHistory.ca’s cross-posting of the GHC’s activist art project “Remember | Resist | Redraw:
A Radical History Poster Project,” e.g., 31 January 2017, http://activehistory.ca/2017/01/remember-resist-redraw-1/.

The newsletter helped disseminate early Otter content more widely than would otherwise have been the case, as many
academics still preferred to read material on paper rather than on their screens. Jim
Clifford recalls that one person printed the newsletter off and read it on the bus long
before they began reading The Otter~La Loutre
regularly online. Personal communication with author, 9 March 2017.

Digital history encompasses scholarship presented using digital technologies as well
as that produced using computational tools and methods. See American Historical
Association, “Guidelines for the Evaluation of Digital Scholarship in History.”

Field Notes, a web-only feature of the
peer-reviewed journal Environmental History,
invites “media-rich” essays that can either stand alone or complement scholarship
published in the journal. See Field Notes,
Environmental History, http://environmentalhistory.net/field-notes/, <viewed 13 August
2016>.

Robert Darnton, “What is the History of Books?,” in The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York: Norton,
1990), 108–35. For one adaptation of Darnton’s model for the digital age, see “The Digital
Communications Circuit,” The Book Unbound: Disruption and
Disintermediation in the Digital Age, University of Stirling, 2012, http://www.bookunbound.stir.ac.uk/research/infographic/, <viewed 30 July
2016>.

Sandra Alston, “A ‘Canadian Ball’ at Rivière-du-Loup, 1840, from the journal of
William Ord Mackenzie,” Findings/Trouvailles,
February 2015, http://www.champlainsociety.ca/canadian-ball-at-riviere-du-loup-1840-william-ord-mackenzie/;
Alston and Cicely Blackstock, eds., ‘Another World’: William
Ord Mackenzie’s Sojourn in the Canadas, 1839-1843 (Toronto: The Champlain
Society, 2015). This volume was available only to Society members; the associated
Findings/Trouvailles post allowed a sliver of its
content much wider circulation than it would otherwise have enjoyed.

TeachingHistory.org, a project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New
Media at George Mason University, has a section called “The Digital Classroom”
(http://teachinghistory.org/digital-classroom) that provides teachers with
resources for using blogs and other digital tools to teach historical thinking skills.